Psapphirical

This week is assessment week which means I get to stay home and happily procrastinate for 5 days while simultaneously being stressed as hell. So far I've stayed more or less on track. Two assignments down, three to go.

The last 5 days, I've been on dial-up internet because stupid Telstra screwed up our internet order and the new modem/installation package still hasn't arrived. When I called last Thursday they said it would arrive on Friday. When I called on Friday they said it would arrive on Monday. Tuesday at the latest. It is now Wednesday. I called earlier and they said "It's just left Sydney, and it should get to you by... maybe tomorrow, but probably Friday."

-.-

The sad thing is that my current dial up speed doesn't feel any different to the 256 kb/s ADSL I used to have. With the added bonus that Photobucket actually works again. Anyway, it's totally weird to hear the dial-up modem sounds again. It feels like I'm back in the year 2000 or something.

In other news, I had another traumatic cockroach experience yesterday. There was a big black cockroach on my desk, my desk! The most intimate and sacred part of my room. It crawled over my keyboard. It was on my mouse! >.<

It was my own fault. I got careless with bringing food into my room again. >.< Luckily, my mother and I teamed up, and armed with a slipper and a can of bug spray, we dispatched the vile beast with minimum casualties. And then mum was nice enough to get rid of the corpse for me, so I wasn't too traumatised. I then proceeded to sanitise my entire desk with tissues. *shudder*

Eurovision is this weekend and I'm really excited about it. I really hope I have new internet by then because I will need to download the entire Eurovision 2008 soundtrack after watching it. :D I know what you're thinking - my life must be really sad for the highlight of my month to be Eurovision, right? Well, all I can say in my defence is... WHAT WHAT IN THE BUTT.

OMG. SO EXHAUSTED.

Today was Orientation for the accelerated Master of Teaching course that I'm doing this year. I got up bright and early at 7am for the first time in 3 months after getting about four hours sleep. I was woken up by the radio alarm and the radio presenter was talking about her years as a teacher because today happened to be a strike day for teachers, who've been wanting a pay rise for ages. So, on the first day of my new life as a 'Teaching Candidate' (that's what they call student teachers now, apparently), the first things I hear upon waking up are:

"Let me tell you now, I've never worked harder in my life than the years when I was a teacher. Teachers work damn hard. And it's a thankless job... nine-to-three job? More like eight-to-five! And Victorian teachers are the lowest paid in the entire country... " etc.

So I was off to a good start.

All negativity aside, though, I'm really excited about the Master of Teaching. All the coordinators/professors/teaching fellows/clinical specialists/people who spoke to us today were really enthusiastic and passionate and professional. And really quite funny, too. The guy who will be taking me for my History Learning Area quoted Cicero and Star Wars in almost the same breath. I like him already. :) This is the first year of the new course under the Melbourne Model, and so they seem to be treating us with kid gloves... probably afraid we'll all drop out if everything is too scary, heh. But yeah... they were all really friendly and helpful and nice, and there were about ten billion free pizzas at lunch. I could have eaten a whole pizza by myself, if I wanted to. But I didn't. I was also really impressed by how everything was so organised. It was obvious that they'd put a lot of planning and effort into this course, which makes me glad to be doing it.

That said... I already have homework and it's not even the first day of uni. /cry

Last night I found out my school placement for this semester. It's going to be at Melbourne Girls' College in Richmond... do any of the Melburnians on my flist know anything about it? Their website didn't seem to have much information. Anyway. The professional practice placements begin in the very first week, so come Wednesday morning at 8:15 am, I will be at Melbourne Girls' College going O.O and probably shaking with nervousness.

Well, it seems like it's going to be very intense year, which I'm actually more excited than scared about right now. I'm such a nerd. :D

Oh, and I actually made 2 new friends today. And I actually remember their names! Matthew and Chelsea. Two very random people from Tasmania who came to Melbourne to do this course. It's good to have people to follow around to in classes. *nods* The sad thing is that I should know the way around the university better than they, since I did my undergraduate degree here lolz.

Once home, life got a tad more stressful because Telstra had called today to tell us that ADSL 2+ was going to be activated at our local exchange (yay!), and someone had somehow convinced mum to switch our phone line rental to Telstra in the process for no apparent reason (wtf?). This was bad, because all the good broadband deals are only good if you're not an existing customer, and if our phone line is already with Telstra then we can't get the half price broadband deal etc. And then I spent about 30 minutes arguing with dad trying to tell him why TPG was a better ISP than Bigpond. And then after 3 more calls to Telstra fleshing out the details of their broadband plans, we... urgh, it's too tiring to explain. Basically, I reminded mum for the fifty six millionth time why she should never EVER sign up for anything with any telemarketer until she either gets me to talk to the sales rep or shows me the fine print. It's like the time dad almost sold all our souls (and phone plans/contracts) to some stupid mobile phone company because a wily salesman took advantage of his non-existent English and inflated ego. I had to call up the stupid little company and scream at the guy for like 20 minutes and threaten all sorts of things before he'd back down. Stressful as fuck... my voice was shaking all over the place afterwards. Grrr. Today wasn't quite as stressful, but I still hate it when my parents do stupid things/make mistakes and I have to bail them out because I'm the only adult in this house who can speak competent English.

And my slow crappy internet with like 0.034 GB of downloads hasn't changed and won't be changing for another month, probably. *sigh*

Anyway. I'm exhausted, so I'm gonna go.

My Fragments of Sappho Challenge-a-thon Fuffy fic is due in less than three weeks. I have two paragraphs. I really should be writing more. The problem is that I rewatched Graduation Day Part 1 today and realised that I'm actually more of a Buffy/Angel shipper. I ship Buffy/Faith on principle (and because Faith is so hot), but argh, the Buffy/Angel OTP is so convincing. It's really hard to get rid of Angel in any Fuffy story set in season three. Meh. We won't even go into Riley in season four. *spits*

Hmm. My internet connection is rather unstable at the moment. This is very scary. My internet has worked consistently ever since I started playing World of Warcraft. I don't know what I would do now if it suddenly decided to die for a week. -.- Probably go insane. But hey, at least the Internet gremlins have great timing. What better time for the internet connection to go screwy than on WoW maintenance night? ;)

Part of my evening was spent sweaty and hot, rolling around on the floor with 2 guys and 2 girls. No, I did not attend an orgy (get your minds outta the gutter :p) It was karate. An impromptu session of wrestling, actually. Today's warm up also included 4 rounds of light contact sparring including twenty push ups on your fingertips in between each round. And that was just the warm up. We had half (more like one third) of the gradings afterwards, with 5 black belts overseeing it. Very scary. And there were so many white belts that we had to do our katas in groups of two or three, and my group was so crap! Omg. It was so nerve wracking that I started off doing the wrong kata, which was a bad start, and totally embarrassing. But then we had to do it again and again and again and again because the guy kept punching too high, and the other girl didn't keep her shoulders straight. I think we ended up doing it like ten times. And after each time they would point out what was wrong, but they never addressed it directly to me... only the other guy and the girl, so I never knew if I was doing it right or wrong. And after each time they would shake their heads and mutter at each other and go "okay, one last time" as if if we didn't get it perfect the next time we would fail! Argh. But we didn't. And at the end, one of the black belts said to me that I did everything correctly but I just needed to punch harder, so I needn't have really worried at all, really. >.o Psychological torture, I tell you.

And now I'm exhausted and very sore, so off to bed it is. *splat*

*sits up*

By the way, my internet is really screwed at the moment, and I don't have the time to fix it. So, people who I chat to semi-regularly, don't feel ignored... it's just that chatting is almost impossible at the moment because I get disconnected every couple of minutes. Grrr.

Oh, one other thing. Did anybody else read in the paper that they might have found Boadicea's bones under a McDonalds in Britain? Pretty cool huh?

Just a quick update before I head off to bed. My internet still isn't working 100%, and none of my chat programs will stay connected for longer than 5 minutes, but at least it's sort of working. Having no internet at all makes me feel stressed out and twitchy. But this is okay. I can deal with this. ... *twitch*

Today was Mother's Day, and tomorrow is my mum's birthday. I prepared a nice dinner with candles and flowers and music and stuff, and then we all watched a movie (it was Walk the Line - as a result I've developed a small temporary crush on Reese Witherspoon). That was nice. Tomorrow night we're going out to a restaurant, so I'll have to miss another session of Karate. Oh well.

I've recently gotten back into Final Fantasy X. I might even finish it one of these days.

Two of my assignments came back this week. My Xena paper got a lovely, satisfying H1. Ahhh. :-) The Russian Rev one received an H2A which is good enough for me, considering I wrote it on 2 days of almost no sleep while talking to like_phobia at the same time. I also completed two other assignments this week - one for Phonetics and one for Old English. Aaaand, I also finished writing a story that I started over 3 years ago. So, all in all, quite a productive week. *beams* Of course, then I spent the weekend playing video games and watching movies, so next week is gonna be full of catching up and stress.

Hmm. I should sleep now.